Measuring Man

 Charles Murray have a difficult time in high school? Judging by what he writes, when he writes, and how he writes, he’s someone who would not have enjoyed the conformist, unimaginative world of contemporary American secondary education. A controversialist who never knows when to stop, a math geek who understands what counts, Murray was probably jostled in the school yard, pushed about in the cafeteria, and, in that hallmark of intellectual independence, repeatedly hauled up in front of the principal. “Murray, don’t ever, ever argue with your teachers again.”

His best-known work, 1994’s The Bell Curve (co-written with Richard J. Herrnstein), triggered a spasm of denunciation, condemnation, and self-righteous indignation that an earlier heretic, the luckless Galileo, would have found all too familiar. It’s not necessary to agree with Murray and Herrnstein’s thesis to be struck by the nature of the criticism it generated, a carnival of vituperation where the language used, replete with keening cries of anathema and frenzied declarations of conformist piety, was more reminiscent of the deliberations of the Inquisition than any attempt at scientific discourse. The message? Suggestions that intelligence is an inherited characteristic are perilous and, if in any way associated with “race,” positively lethal.

So what, nine years later, has Murray gone and done? Indefatigable, delightfully tactless, and armored only with a thick cladding of protective statistics, America’s heretic has volunteered once more for the stake, this time as the author of a book that in essence argues that a wildly disproportionate part of mankind’s intellectual and cultural patrimony is the work of those reviled monsters, the “dead white males.” Will the man never learn?

Praising dead white males is bad enough, of course, but even if we put that grave offense to one side, it’s a sad reflection of the current intellectual climate to see that Murray’s belief in the possibility of making objective assessments of human achievement will likely be condemned as lunacy, and, worse still, as unacceptably—and archaically—“judgmental.” Seared by the inquisitorial fire last time, Murray tries to anticipate these objections with statistical method; taken in aggregate, he argues, the data cannot lie. It may be reasonable to disagree with the relative rankings of, to pick two of his greats, Michelangelo and Picasso, but not with the overall conclusion: “Now is a good time to stand back in admiration. What the human species is today it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.”

But before any living white males are tempted to reach for brown shirts and chilled champagne, it’s important to recognize that Human Accomplishment is far from being a piece of ethnic cheerleading, nor is it any cause for Old World complacency. Always reliably gloomy, Murray warns, “it appears that Europe’s run is over. In another few hundred years, books will probably be exploring the reasons why some completely different part of the world became the locus of great human accomplishment.”

Murray’s method of reaching these conclusions is intriguing. To start with, he confines his examination of “accomplishment” to the sciences and the